Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Shortly after his defeat in the presidential election of 1912, Roosevelt undertook to write an autobiography, which he completed in the early fall of 1913. Even the best memoirs tend to be self-serving, and Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography is no exception. Nevertheless, Roosevelt brought to bear on this project his fine literary talents, his extensive experience as a writer of history, his profound understanding of many current issues, and his desire to share a life story of which he was justifiably very proud. The end product was a very readable, reputable, and revealing volume, which continues to be looked upon by historians as a valuable primary resource.

Roosevelt's extraordinarily successful foreign policy presents the student of history with a sizable roster of major accomplishments. Particularly notable among them were the development of a deep-rooted friendship between Great Britain and the United States and two adroit mediations that ended one great power war and forestalled another. Roosevelt brought Russian and Japanese representatives to the United States in August 1905 and proceeded to engineer the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and won for the president a Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt's diplomacy also was instrumental in resolving the Franco-German Moroccan crisis of 1905–1906, which very conceivably could have resulted in a world war. As proud as he was of his service to peace as a mediator par excellence, Roosevelt appears to have been even prouder of his attainments pertaining to the Panama Canal and the U.S. Navy. Such an interpretation is supported by plentiful evidence, including Roosevelt's claim, put forward in his autobiography, that “the two American achievements that really impressed foreign peoples during the first dozen years of this century were the digging of the Panama Canal and the cruise of the battle fleet round the world.”

Having secured an agreement with Great Britain in November 1901 permitting U.S. control and fortification of a future canal across the Central American isthmus, Roosevelt became frustrated in 1903 when he determined that Colombia, then sovereign in Panama, was negotiating with the United States in bad faith. Well aware of the strong and rising secessionist ferment in Panama, Roosevelt encouraged the secessionists—though only privately and even then only by indirection. The president soon transferred U.S. naval vessels to the waters near Panama to prevent Colombia from landing troops to suppress an uprising. Panama's revolution against Colombian rule was swift, successful, and practically bloodless. Shortly afterward, the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of November 18, 1903, granted the United States sovereignty “in perpetuity” over a ten-mile-wide canal zone and made Panama a virtual U.S. protectorate. For the remainder of his presidency, Roosevelt was heavily (and very usefully) involved in the building of the Panama Canal, a mammoth and enormously complex project that would take about a decade to complete.

As for the navy, Roosevelt, the author of The Naval War of 1812 and former assistant secretary of the navy, came into the presidency as a big-navy advocate possessing a high level of expertise on naval issues. Focusing his efforts primarily on the construction of modern battleships, Roosevelt elevated the U.S. Navy from the world's sixth largest in 1901 to the second in size by 1907. He also dramatically upgraded the navy's readiness and efficiency.

Relations between the United States and Japan were tense in 1907 owing to anti-Japanese agitation and violence on the American West Coast and the continuing arrival in America of large numbers of Japanese laborers. A U.S.-Japan war, while not likely, was becoming an increasing possibility. At the same time, Roosevelt was worried about the parsimony of Congress and the apathy of the American public regarding naval matters. So, in his single most illustrious act of big stick diplomacy, in December 1907 Roosevelt dispatched his “Great White Fleet” of sixteen battleships on a fourteen-month world cruise. Not a threatening word was written or spoken—indeed, the fleet visited Japan in October 1908 and was met there with a grand welcome—but the message that America was powerful and prepared to uphold its interests was unmistakable. Back home, public enthusiasm for the highly publicized cruise had the intended effect of loosening congressional purse strings with regard to funding the president's naval building proposals. “No single thing in the history of the new United States Navy,” Roosevelt asserts in his autobiography, “has done as much to stimulate popular interest and belief in it as the world cruise.”

The circumnavigation of the globe by the Great White Fleet actually contributed to a marked improvement in U.S.-Japanese relations in 1908. The Root-Takahira Agreement of November 1908—in which Japan pledged to respect U.S. control of the Philippines in exchange for U.S. assurances concerning Japan's priorities on the East Asian mainland—demonstrated to the world the establishment of a respectful and amicable U.S.-Japan relationship and signaled a climactic triumph for Roosevelt's Japanese policy. Therefore, Roosevelt could declare five years later with some justification, “The most important service that I rendered to peace was the voyage of the battle fleet round the world.”